The Best-Laid Plans. Randal O'Toole
times and did not publish its final plan until 1994—18 years after Congress passed the law requiring forest plans.
Things didn’t get any better when the completed plans were turned over to managers to implement. Many managers soon found that the data in the plans didn’t jibe with the conditions they found on the ground.
• After doing “site-specific analyses” on 20 percent of the forest, the supervisor of Idaho’s Clearwater National Forest (home of the 650-foot computer-projected trees) informed the regional forester in 1990 that the forest could sell only about two-thirds as much timber as FORPLAN had calculated.3
• Timber managers on Utah’s Wasatch-Cache National Forest reported in 1991 that many acres that planners had considered suitable for timber management weren’t really suitable. They also found that planners had overestimated timber growth rates and that planned timber sales weren’t as compatible with wildlife as planners presumed. Managers estimated they could sell less than half as much timber as FORPLAN had calculated.4
• The General Accounting Office, working closely with officials of the Flathead National Forest, concluded that the Montana forest could only sustain about three quarters of the timber cuttings scheduled by FORPLAN.5
The years of indecision and the transfer of scarce funds and resources from management to planning frustrated on-the-ground Forest Service workers. By 1990, Forest Service employee surveys found that morale had sunk to its lowest levels ever. Internal memos revealed that employees felt that the agency suffered from a lack of leadership and had lost its identity as one of the nation’s leading conservation agencies. “The Washington office leadership is in a situation where the oars are out of the water and the Diesel engines are shut off,” one regional memo bitterly reported in early 1989.6
Regional officials told the chief that they couldn’t achieve the timber targets Congress was expecting, and became upset when the chief turned around and promised Congress that they could meet those targets. Dissension over timber targets reached a peak in November 1989, when the forest supervisors from the 19 national forests in Oregon and Washington prepared a videotape for the chief.
“I understand why targets are emphasized and how those targets generate dollars,” said Umpqua Forest Supervisor Robert Devlin on the video. But he warned that he could not meet his targets without unduly harming other resources. “The people who I am familiar with on the ground are not comfortable with this, and neither am I.” Unless this problem is solved, he told the chief, “I can’t be the steward of the public lands that you depend on me to be.”7
Thirteen forest supervisors in Montana and northern Idaho wrote a memo supporting the video. Because of timber targets, they said, “We are not meeting the quality land management expectations of our public and our employees.” They added, “A ’can-do’ attitude cannot save us this time.”8 A second memo signed by 63 forest supervisors from throughout the interior West noted that “our timber program has been 35 percent of the National Forest System budget for the last 20 years while recreation, fish and wildlife, and soil and water have been 2 to 3 percent each.” Because of this imbalance, “the allowable sale quantity [ASQ] issue will continue to be a problem for us and some supervisors feel our ASQs are unrealistic even with full funding.”9 As a narrator on the videotape told the chief, “It’s time to reconsider program emphasis and round out multiple use.”
The chief apparently listened. The national forests offered 11 billion board feet of timber for sale in 1990, but sales fell to just 6 billion in 1991, 5 billion in 1992, and under 4 billion in 1994.10 By 2000, the agency was selling around 1.5 billion board feet a year, though sales recovered slightly to about 2.8 billion board feet in 2006.11
Many people blame this reduction in sales on the northern spotted owl, which was listed as a threatened species in 1990. The spotted owl lives in only about a dozen national forests in the Pacific Northwest. Yet national forests throughout the West, and to a lesser degree in the East, significantly reduced timber sales. It is clear that national forest sales declined largely because forest managers did not believe the forest plans and concluded instead that historic sale levels were too high.
The only forest plans that foreshadowed this decline came out of Oregon and Washington, known in the Forest Service as Region 6. Region 6 had historically been the Forest Service’s leading timber region. Though Oregon and Washington forests comprised less than 13 percent of the land area of the national forests, they typically produced 40 percent of the volume and more than half the revenue. Insiders sometimes said, “The real chief of the Forest Service is the Region 6 director of timber management.”
Yet when Jeff Sirmon, the regional forester, responded to John Crowell’s pressure to boost timber sales by ordering planners to start over, he apparently let it be known that he would support reductions in sales proposed by the forests provided they could present an airtight case for such reductions. While previous Region 6 regional foresters were known as “timber beasts” who might have welcomed Crowell’s timber imperative, Sirmon did not have a long history of working in forests dominated by timber sales: his previous job had been in Utah, a state not known for having particularly productive forests.
Yet it wasn’t just Sirmon vs. Crowell. People throughout the region were disturbed by the recession’s effects on the industry. They felt they had an unwritten agreement with the timber companies: the Forest Service would sell lots of timber each year, and the industry would cut it, thus keeping the revenues flowing into the Knutson-Vandenberg and similar funds. But the recession of the early 1980s was so bad that timber companies almost completely stopped cutting public timber. Lacking the anticipated revenues, Region 6 had to lay off thousands of employees. Even many of the most hard-core timber supporters felt that the agency should diversify its sources of revenue and political support.
Around this time, the 1970 Environmental Teach-In (Earth Day) began to influence the Forest Service. Before 1974, most forestry school graduates came from rural areas and were sympathetic to a commodity-production view of forestry. But Earth Day inspired many urban high school students (including this writer) to go to forestry school. As a result, by 1974, most forestry school graduates came from urban areas and were more sympathetic to wildlife, wilderness, and other amenities. By the late 1980s, many of these people were rising to positions of power within the agency.
Partly because of this change, the new plans from nearly all the national forests in Region 6 significantly reduced timber sales. Overall, the plans would have reduced Region 6 timber sales by 45 percent, from 5.5 billion board feet to 3.0 billion. The timber industry did its best to delay implementation, including pressuring Congress to try to stop the plans. But what really killed the plans was the spotted owl.
Abandoning the goal of “comprehensive planning,” the Forest Service responded to the spotted owl controversy by dealing with the owl in a separate plan—ultimately, a series of plans—that would cover all spotted owl national forests as well as other federal lands managed by the Department of the Interior (the Forest Service is in the Department of Agriculture). The 3 billion board feet that came out of the forest plans did not take the owl plans into account. When the president’s Northwest Forest Plan was finally approved in 1994, it rendered obsolete the plans for all the owl forests and many of the other forests in the region.
Despite the plan’s effects on the timber program, many Forest Service employees welcomed the final spotted owl plan. Having convinced themselves that they were cutting too much timber, national forest managers were happy to let the owl take the blame for reductions. By 1996, timber purchasers cut only three-quarters of a billion board feet of wood from all 19 Region 6 forests—less than they had cut from just one Oregon forest, the Willamette, in 1989.
Practically overnight, the Forest Service was transformed from an agency dominated by timber to one that attempted to focus on ecosystem management. Yet a billion dollars and more than a decade invested in planning had almost nothing to do with this transformation, except to the extent that the plans had failed so badly that they exposed many of the other problems with the agency.
Comprehensive forest planning turned out to be a demoralizing nightmare for the Forest Service.